


Dynasphere

by Omorka



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 14:31:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omorka/pseuds/Omorka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>S.H.I.E.L.D. picks up a lot of alien artifacts; occasionally they need expert help to figure out what they're for.  Nick Fury's not entirely sure that Tony Stark counts as "expert," but he'll do in a pinch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dynasphere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jedimasterstar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedimasterstar/gifts).



> For the Multifan_Gift exchange on LiveJournal, December 2012.

“No, no, it’s very impressive,” Tony assured the random S.H.I.E.L.D agent at the console. “It’s not every day you get to see a, you know, piece of rusted alien wreckage from the stars. It was a lot more awe-inspiring before it hit atmosphere, I’m sure.”

“I’m not interested in who it impresses,” Nick Fury rumbled behind him.

Tony’s eyes widened, just slightly, before he spun on his heel. “This whole silent approach thing you’ve got going on,” he griped, “you’re going to have to teach me that one of these days.”

Fury allowed himself a dark chuckle at that. “Stark, you want to learn to walk into a room without instantly becoming the center of attention about like I want to learn how to spend the rest of my life raising kittens. Fluffy ones.” He pointed at a relatively un-melted section of the tangle of intermeshing shards and shavings. “Most of this is a sophisticated but relatively uncomplicated alloy of iron, carbon, and iridium. Tough stuff, but nothing we can’t cook up for ourselves.”

Tony nodded along. “Sure, you’d be limited mostly by the price of the iridium. And the oxidation rate; not a great choice for a wet planet.” He seemed more interested despite himself. “So,” he added, “if that were what you wanted replicated, you wouldn’t have called me in. What’s that other bit there?”

Fury tapped the console; the whole six-meter sphere rotated in place, bringing the more damaged section to face them. “This part, on the interior here,” he continued, “is mostly titanium and vanadium -”

At that, Tony’s eyebrows went up. “Fuselage alloy?”

Frowning, Fury continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “With a significant admixture of platinum, thallium, and a few other heavy metals in small enough quantities we haven’t been able to pick them out.” He swiped at the console screen; a diagram in bright colors filled the display, spinning slowly. “Our best materials engineers had the same initial idea you did, and they’re not sure they were wrong - but a fuselage for what? And why that particular combination?”

Tony ducked under the first layer of plastic curtains between him and the salvaged construction. “Let me guess,” he mused, “there’s an energy signature from within that section?”

“Barely detectable,” Fury answered, nodding. “Nothing that matches anything we’ve got on file. Think you could take a look at the readings and come up with something?”

Leaning over the edge of the railing, Tony watched the wreck drift in its magnetic field. “How much of that are you guys generating,” he asked, “ and how much is the wreck?”

“We’re just containing it,” Fury said, half-grinning. 

“There’s a couple of field generators to turn it, and two to keep it stable. But it’s maintaining its own altitude,” clarified the technician.

Tony slid his hands into his pockets. “Sure,” he agreed, “I can spare a few minutes to look it over.” He glanced back over his shoulder, and added, “And I want Banner to check my numbers when I’m done.”

“Way ahead of you,” Fury replied with a wave, already walking away.

\---

The lab - or warehouse - top secret storage area? - whatever it was, was nearly dark except for the screen in front of Tony and the light blue glow of the two primary field generators. Tony would have protested that he preferred a low-light work area, but the truth was, he was rapidly going into raster burn, even with the high-contrast workstation. Also, he needed coffee. Real coffee, not the burned sludge in the S.H.I.E.L.D. canteen.

Gently, he pushed his chair away from the touchscreen and leaned against the plastic film between his makeshift workshop and the alien wreckage. “Too bad the Viking guy’s not here,” he mused aloud. “Maybe he’d recognize you.”

The nearly spherical assemblage continued to rotate in its field. Tony watched the facets drift by. The construction didn’t seem to make any sense; while individual shapes did recur, they never maintained a pattern for long. Some sections resembled each other, but weren’t exact duplicates; others seemed nearly random, with small and large shards of metal crammed into each other at odd angles. It clearly wasn’t airtight, and hadn’t been even before its uncontrolled descent through the atmosphere.

“Surface area?” Tony wondered out loud. A sphere was designed to have maximum volume and minimum surface area, but the net effect of the fragmentary surface would be to increase the surface area while maintaining the same volume. But that only made sense if some sort of reaction was occurring on the jagged surface - radiating heat or light, or some other form of energy.

Well, that was at least a working hypothesis. Tony rolled the diagram between two fingers on the screen, hunting for the position of the fuselage within the bigger sphere. There it was - about two meters in diameter, slightly off-center, with half a dozen fans of the steel-like alloy holding it in place within the outer shell. One of them was snapped, leaving the enclosure closer to one side of the shell. He set up a quick algorithm - if the central module were generating heat in a vacuum, the shell would act as a remarkably efficient radiator. It would be less effective in atmosphere, but it would still keep the central pod from overheating.

“Gotcha,” Tony muttered. “Now, what in that thing could be generating that much heat?”

The next moment stretched into a quarter hour, as he mentally posed scenarios and then dissected them. Finally he rubbed one hand through his hair, exhaling sharply. “Not enough data,” he grumbled.

He looked through the plastic again. Had Fury explicitly told him not to go in there? Surely if the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. had intended for him to not touch the mysterious alien artifact, he would have said so explicitly. Tony didn’t think he had. At least, not in so many words.

Permission was for peons, anyway.

Tony carefully climbed over the railing and lowered himself to the floor next to the larger of the main field generators. The half-charred sphere was spinning on an axis tilted about forty-five degrees to the floor; from this vantage point, with the light from the upper generator filtering through, Tony could see the solid fuselage contrasting strongly with the porous shell around it. He reached up as the inner sphere shifted towards him, his fingers a few inches from the outermost shards.

Something glinted inside the sphere.

“What’s that?” Tony said to himself, grinning sharply. “Come to papa.” He stretched up and brushed the lowest edge with his fingertips.

One of the shards spun loosely under his fingers; the interior glittered again and winked out, as if it were flirting. Tony’s grin broadened as he grabbed the scaffolding holding the observation platform and boosted himself up, making another grab.

The shards rolled outward, forming a hole as his right hand passed where the surface had been. He flailed, off-balance; the scraps rippled back in, points inward, and caught him neatly.

He was quite thoroughly stuck, and the sphere was still turning.

“Oh, no, no,” Tony scolded. “Let me go, baby. I - oof!”

The sphere dragged him off his feet. He clung for purchase to the scaffold railing, but the sphere’s rotation never slowed; it nearly dislocated his shoulder before he lost his grip. A trickle of blood ran down Tony’s wrist; one of the points had managed to break skin. He scrabbled at the jagged surface with his other hand, trying to find enough of a handhold to at least support part of his weight.

“What’s moving this thing?” Tony asked, feeling around inside the sphere for wires or motors that might explain the shards’ sudden mobility. He found nothing but bare, unyielding metal. Sharp, too; he yanked a fingertip back too late to keep it from getting sliced.

As the sphere turned, the bottom became the side, then the top. Tony pulled up his knees and tried to get his own weight under him again; it was going to take some leverage to get his hand out of this trap. The outside, rough as it was, was surprisingly slick.

Just as he finally managed to get on his hands and knees, the section underneath him spun away; he dropped into the center of the sphere, flailing. His head impacted something surprisingly light for how hard it was; it split open just a fraction of a millimeter.

Light spilled out of the crack in front of him. “Did I really hit it that hard?” Tony mumbled, as the arc reactor flared in response and he slid into unconsciousness.

\---

“He did what?” Banner said, cautiously holding the warehouse door open.

“He got himself sucked into the alien device,” Fury repeated, with an extra side order of disgust. “Near as we can tell, it’s forcing the arc reactor to run at full capacity. We think it’s charging its internal batteries. Close the damn door.”

Bruce nodded, letting it swing shut behind him. The sphere bristled with metallic spines, now, like a startled pufferfish; the shell was open enough to see the interior core, with its rippled surface. Occasionally a ripple shifted position, flashing a bright reflection through the jagged gridwork.

“You’re sure he’s in there?” Banner asked, his eyes falling to the workstation screen.

“Yup,” Fury grumbled. “We can detect his heartbeat, at least.”

Bruce eased into the seat in front of the screen, eyes tracing a dozen readouts. “That looks like a solid metal surface on the interior portion.”

“It is.”

“How is he breathing?”

Fury paused. “Good question.”

\---

Tony’s eyes flew open. For an instant, he thought he was in the armor, powered completely down; then he felt the needles in his arms.

The alien device had pierced him in a dozen places; the tiny chamber he was in, barely long enough for him, smelled of blood and hot metal. He tried to flex one arm and was rewarded with searing pain; his right ankle was immobilized between a pair of blades, his left half-skewered. He sucked in a breath; it was warm and stale.

He looked up (at least he could move his head a little bit) and addressed the shell: “Hey, didn’t your previous owner need to breathe?”

His chest was on fire, too. A pair of cables snaked into his chest on either side of the arc reactor, which was running hot - far too hot. Tony calculated how long it would take before meltdown at the current rate.

He was not consoled by the realization that he’d suffocate first.

\---

“I wonder if it realizes that its power source will melt down if it continues to discharge it,” Bruce said, less for Fury’s benefit than for the artifact’s.

If it understood him, it showed no sign. The outer shell was beginning to glow a gentle orange as it bounced gently against the blue field generators. It definitely wanted out; whether to escape or to attack its captors was anyone’s guess.

Fury was clearly guessing the latter. “Will that destroy it if it does?”

“Possibly,” Bruce agreed. “It’ll most certainly kill Mr. Stark.”

Fury tried to look like that didn’t bother him any. “That may not be something we can get around at this point.”

Bruce pushed the screen away and stood up. “Is it more important to you to prevent the artifact’s escape or to retain it intact?”

“I’d rather it melt down than have it get out of here and start Gaussing supercharged scrap metal at Omaha, if that’s what you mean,” Fury answered, his head tilted. “Obviously, it’d be better for everyone involved if we could preserve it for study, but -”

“At this point, I think that’s a lost cause,” Banner said apologetically. “If it doesn’t stop overdriving the reactor, we’ve got about thirty minutes. We might, if you have a sufficiently fast plane available, be out of blast radius by then.”

Fury looked surprised. “Are you saying we should evacuate?”

“You should do that regardless.” Bruce pulled back the plastic sheeting with one hand. “Tony’s got less than five minutes of air, and if he doesn’t have a self-destruct on the reactor, he’s significantly less paranoid than a multibillionaire ought to be.”

“You said we’d need a thirty-minute head start to outrun it,” Fury objected. “Or do you not think the self-destruct will cause a big enough boom?”

Bruce shrugged and kicked off his shoes. “I don’t intend to find out.”

The scaffolding bowed under the Hulk’s sudden weight, then buckled as the green giant leapt into the metal burr, roaring.

\---

Tony woke up for the second time, blinking into the bright lights of an infirmary. He inhaled; the air was cool, with the tang of antiseptic and rubbing alcohol. One of the needles was still in his arm. Wait, no that was attached to an IV bag. He blinked again and sat up.

“That was a pretty dumb stunt,” Fury said from somewhere over his left shoulder.

“Okay, that one doesn’t count, since I was unconscious when you snuck up on me,” Tony wheedled. “What happened?”

“It was essentially a battery,” Banner’s voice explained from somewhere off to Tony’s right. He looked over; Bruce was wearing a hospital gown, but he looked fine, if a little weary around the eyes. “I’m guessing their culture used up their own star system’s energy resources, so they built those things to find small, powerful energy sources, suck up the power, and then come back. They’re effectively self-repairing; they can get most of the elements they’d need to rebuild the outer shell in any asteroid field.”

“So it wasn’t radiating heat, it was absorbing it. But that doesn’t seem very efficient,” Tony objected. “They’d be better off just migrating to the next star.”

“Look at the thing,” Bruce insisted. “It’s not equipped for faster-than-light travel, or for passengers. I don’t think the culture that built that is interested in travel. Maybe they can’t - too fragile to handle the G’s of takeoff, maybe.” He paused, his eyes trailing to the glow under Tony’s own flimsy gown. “Why it decided to overcharge itself rather than just taking the arc reactor with it, I don’t know. I’m guessing the AI isn’t very adaptable.”

Something Bruce had said earlier suddenly rang a bell for Tony. “Um - it is currently repairing itself?” he asked.

“Trying to,” Fury informed him. “At the moment, we’re not letting it have any of the trace elements it needs, so it’s still in pieces.”

Tony’s eyes lowered. “Did you bust me out of there?” he asked, turning towards Bruce again.

Bruce looked away. “Yeah.”

Tony’s face split into a wolfish grin. “Awesome! I can’t believe I keep missing it. I gotta watch you rescue me one of these days.”

“I’d just as soon it wasn’t necessary,” Bruce admitted, still finding the wall more interesting than Tony.

“Stuff like this keeps happening, you’re all going to have to get used to it,” Fury grumbled. “Sleep it off. I’m going to need you both back in the lab before it gets itself back together. The other guy disassembled it all over the warehouse floor, so we’re still in clean-up mode right now.”

“I better use protection this time,” Tony noted. Banner suppressed an exasperated laugh; Fury rolled his eyes and handed Tony his cell phone.

Tony tapped the screen, then stopped, his mouth awry.

“Something wrong?” Fury asked.

Tony looked up sheepishly. “The battery’s drained.”

This time Bruce failed to catch the laugh, and Tony joined in.


End file.
